London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  That early refuge at 34–5 Howland Street was once commemorated by a plaque for Verlaine, with no mention of his youthful partner in crime. Underwood, in a footnote to his essay, tells us that he was walking down Howland Street ‘on the precise day in 1938 when the house was being demolished to make way for a telephone exchange’. He rescued the Verlaine plaque that had been unveiled in 1922 by Paul Valéry. At the time of writing, he still had it.

  It’s a nice notion, as Patrick Keiller points out in his film London, that the lover-poets are now honoured, not by a modest plaque, but by the priapic absurdity of the Post Office Tower. A sculpture of unsatisfied male desire. ‘L’acropole officielle outre les conceptions de la barbarie moderne les plus colossales,’ Rimbaud wrote in ‘Villes’, one of his Illuminations.

  Allen Ginsberg would have been excited by the connection. When I interviewed him on Primrose Hill in 1967, he made constant reference to the ‘thorn tower’ and its magnificent thrust, bristling with paranoid listening devices. For the Beat poet, this was the ultimate symbol of the City. When a young boy, dodging school, sat on the grass for a smoke, Ginsberg interrogated him.

  ‘Hey, you know that big tower up there, what is it?’

  ‘It’s the GPO Tower.’

  ‘No. The tower tower tower tower. The round thorn tower. Is that a hotel?’

  ‘General Post Office Tower. They send all the television relays out.’

  ‘They got radar on the top. In case a war starts.’

  We come through a tight passageway, one of those urban secrets allowed to survive between eras: a crack, a cranny, old bricks brushing our shoulders. It’s an effort of will to reconnect with the Overground and not to drift on to St Pancras Old Church, the railway terminals, redeveloped warehouses, Euro shopping zones, canal veins ghosting towards the Islington tunnel. The whole area is up for grabs.

  We plodded back to the point where the railway crosses Camden Road. I remembered a Day of the Dead window I wanted to photograph: flowered skulls and tombstone teeth rioting in psychedelic frenzy. In our present condition, a little woozy, a lot weary, those brilliant, sharp-edged skulls were enamel badges to be pinned straight to our white eyeballs. We were well prepared for our future engagement with John Clare and his ‘paraphrenic delusions’, as Geoffrey Grigson called them. Clare as a night-wanderer in London was supersensitive to emanations associated with the cracks and fissures between buildings, the slippage between centuries: ‘Thin, death-like shadows and goblins with saucer eyes were continually shaping on the darkness from my haunted imagination.’

  I was sympathetic to the description of his condition on the form filled out for his induction into Northampton General Asylum. A mental collapse brought on ‘after years addicted to Poetical prosing’. Soon Clare would believe that his eyes had no pupils. Soon we would believe that the end was in sight and a second circuit was not required.

  Andrew was cowled in silence. We were on parallel tramlines, locked into our separate derangements. Whenever he came up alongside me, he seemed to be muttering the same phrases on a loop, as a form of neurotic penance or bizarre humour.

  ‘Almost mathematical,’ he whispered. ‘Make up your own rules. Own rules, own rules. Make it up. Flesh radios. Start at the end. Reverse engineer meaning.’

  Sanity was preserved by the bones of the railway, dragging us towards Caledonian Road & Barnsbury, the residential squares and visible aspirations of Islington. The sort of territory from which the Blairs could move on to oligarchic wealth and global infamy.

  Agar Grove shadowed the Overground with not much between road and railway. In 1966 Leon Kossoff, coming west down the old line from his perch on Dalston Lane to the builder’s shed at Willesden Junction, paused on York Way. There is a promising railway bridge that it would be churlish to resist. Cross-town workaday traffic is a modest intrusion on the landscape, while economically significant intercity services gush out of King’s Cross. Here you will find the random accumulations, fragments of wall and shed, that passengers, settling back, if they have managed to secure a seat, register as symbolizing the essence of the city they have paid so much to leave behind.

  Kossoff sketched York Way Railway Bridge, and from those sketches made a number of large drawings, charcoal and pastel on paper. Again he seems to be registering, in landscape format, the seminar of floating huts, shredded sky, stumps of towers along the curve of the horizon. All this energized space is seen in bright, sunless illumination, like the afterflash of an explosion at night. The method of choosing a number of privileged viewpoints, and returning to them, time after time, had its advantages over the steady plod around the entire circuit; a technique fated to decline into more poetical prosings. A queasy flicker-show of snapshots and echoes. Misremembered dialogue and overloaded prose. Painters have the purity of gesture: thought as act as meaning.

  Impossible to tramp down Brewery Road without recalling Beckett’s Murphy. I knew and honoured the hawk-faced Dubliner as a great and perhaps undervalued London walker: there was much ground to be covered between the early decades in Foxrock and Paris. Biographers call these ‘The Bad Years’. London was mental anguish, frustration, psychotherapy; visits as a close observer to the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Bromley; the suburban version of the original Bedlam. The hospital was useful research for the novel that became Murphy. Beckett, in his disaffection with work, place, life, stamped many miles across the metropolitan area. He has spoken about how, on one occasion, out of nowhere, he found that he had stopped moving. There was no valid reason to take another step. He sought help from psychoanalysis, in the person of W. R. Bion. Psychoanalysis was not available in Dublin, though the town was well supplied with madhouses.

  Like his leading character, Beckett lived in World’s End, West Brompton, while he wrestled with the novel. Presumably he was attracted by that name: World’s End. I was fascinated by the way the geography of Murphy predicated our Overground circuit: from dealings with Lots Road, Cremorne Road and Stadium Street, ‘the smell of the reach’, the proximity of the burial ground with its specialized cruisers, to our present map reference on the approach to the old Caledonian Cattle Market.

  Murphy relocates to a room in Brewery Road: ‘between Pentonville Prison and the Metropolitan Cattle Market’. He likes to take the sun on a bench where he can enjoy the perfume of ‘disinfectants from Milton House immediately to the south and the stench of stalled cattle from the corral immediately to the west’.

  I mention these things to Kötting, whose feet are now advancing in a mechanical Cartesian fashion, very true to the spirit of Beckett. Push out. Test the surface, as if the toes were fingers. If the pain is acceptable, draw the leg back and repeat the prescription. As a proselytizer for Sam, Andrew looked more to the plays than the novels.

  ‘The unfathomability,’ he said. ‘The placelessness that is his writing.’

  I found nothing but place, place transformed. Andrew is more the poet. He talks of ‘contemplation as a means of navigation’. I’m a clay-footed literalist. I saw in the deserted street Murphy’s long climb home. ‘And while Brewery Road was by no means a Boulevard de Clichy nor even des Batignolles, still it was better at the end of the hill than either of them, as asylum (after a point) is better than exile.’

  Putting on time, the element that is never truly put on, Murphy makes repeated pedestrian circuits around Pentonville Prison – where so many, including numbers of his countrymen, met their ends. Sir Roger Casement, the Irish republican and author of the notorious Black Diaries, was hanged within these walls. Oscar Wilde, whose sad wraith, in transit between Wandsworth and Reading, we encountered on the platform at Clapham Common, was lodged here. Murphy walked as Beckett had walked in other cities around silent cathedrals after they had sold their last tickets for the day.

  There is a circulation, of prisoners in privatized vans, cattled between the holding pens of remand and facilities adequately furnished as places of execution. A circulation of footballers, rising and falling, injured
and ageing, between railway-accessed stadia. A circulation of poets and political exiles moving between rooming houses. A circulation of figures trapped in the limbo of novels specific to certain districts of London. A circulation of images of circulation: the terrible clockwise procession of silent men in Doré’s engraving Newgate – Exercise Yard. They shuffle under brick walls that cancel any prospect of the sky. The motif is reprised by another London visitor, Vincent Van Gogh, in Prisoners Exercising (After Doré), which he completed in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in February 1890. The painful circularity of asylums and motorways and railways for commuters.

  Murphy waits for the sound of the bell from the prison tower of Pentonville. He remembers a bench of refuge in a small public garden south of the Royal Free Hospital that now ‘lay buried under one of those malignant proliferations of urban tissue known as service flats’.

  The ineradicable circularity of reference is undoing us. We are so much taken with figures projected out of fiction, with poets worrying at expeditions in quest of serviceable images of the quickening city, that we are quite incapable of knowing where, at any given moment, we are. The shadow-lines on Kötting’s face are the acid bite of cross-hatched engravings. If we pause for a moment on the heights of Caledonian Road, somewhere between Holloway Prison and Pentonville Prison, female and male, force-fed suffragettes and waxwork murderers, Neville Heath and John Reginald Halliday Christie waiting for the rope, we don’t appreciate stragglers heading for home, exhausted nightworkers: we are too busy flipping the carousel of quotations. Ill-assorted couples embarked on their voyages of derangement.

  The Two Pilgrims at Highgate. Doré’s London expeditions begin with a vision of the twinned conspirators, writer and painter, at the start of their journey; silhouettes seen from behind, under the sails of the trees, paused, looking down on the rumour of a city. ‘We are Pilgrims,’ Jerrold wrote, ‘wanderers, gipsy-loiterers in the great world of London … We are wanderers; not, I repeat, historians.’

  Wanderers are amateurs of geography, literature, statistics; scavenging researchers, provokers of exploitable accidents. They behave like suspended detectives with no proper brief, going through the motions. They stalk other stalkers. Georges Simenon manages this alienation very neatly in his slim Maigret novel from 1931, A Crime in Holland. A monoglot French detective investigates a crime in a sombre Dutch town, where the rivermen and farmers have no other language. Walking is the only tool of interrogation. ‘Maigret, by dint of walking in step with the other man, could literally sense his state of mind.’

  Brewery Road was a boulevard of unexplained warehouses and distribution centres, but the new digital industries, the solicitors of commissions, were in evidence. One former storage space was now dressed with crimson carpet, apologetically thin furniture, and a large glass door with a slogan spelled out in red dots: THIS IS NOT A DOOR.

  Pentonville Prison has not yet been rebranded as a boutique hotel; the sour bricks resist it. Churchy windows offer a view of the Overground tracks that no prisoners, locked in their hutches, lights out, will enjoy. The voodoo of capital, budget balancing, outsourcing, has found some bright navy paint to hint at blue-sky thinking. Pinned to the slatted panel is a sheet that mimics a notional window, behind which a skeleton rattles the bars of his cell. HMP PENTONVILLE WAR ON DRUGS. WILL POWER IS REAL POWER. When there are no solutions to a problem, invite the ad men to come up with a punchy image. That’s the trick: sell the problem, not the answer.

  Climbing up Offord Road, back on familiar territory, and reacquainted with the Overground, I know that it’s almost done. We can hear the never-satisfied pre-climactic sigh of the trains. Highbury & Islington Station is a short step. Then it should be less than thirty minutes to our beds. The effect Simenon mentions, reading another person’s mind by falling into step with him, or tracking behind and regulating your pace, has not kicked in. Andrew is at sea. There is a peak of exhaustion, chill creeping through leaky wetsuit, he associates with swimming for more than an hour on a turning tide. Achieving that state on land, he converts ground to mud, then brine. Mouth agape, he struggles to take an honest breath. He is making agonizingly slow, steady strides over waves of tarmac, hair stiffening to thatch in anticipation of his future role as a Straw Bear in the film of John Clare’s escape from the High Beach Asylum. And as he becomes more sculptural, more of an English scarecrow, I speed up, in the neurotic urgency to tell the tale, get all the connections in before we arrive in a Dalston that must have changed out of all recognition in the hours we’ve been away.

  Andrew does not need this. But I can’t stop; he has to know about what it was like to get inside the house on Royal College Street. The poet Anthony Rudolf offered me the chance to join a select group of Rimbaud enthusiasts on a visit arranged with the current owner of the property, Michael Corby.

  I met Rudolf – lean, professorial, engaged – as I stepped down from the Overground at Camden Road. Waiting on the doorstep of 8 Royal College Street was James Campbell, Francophile author and Beat Generation promoter. The big debate between the two scholars concerned the particular window from which Rimbaud watched Verlaine returning from the market with an undernourished herring for his tea: top floor or first floor? Rimbaud, the mannerless hoodlum poet, sniggered at the absurdity: the older man, in his silly pudding of a hat, carrying a fish in one hand and a bottle of oil in the other. Like a pantomime advertisement for their soured physical relationship. The tempers of narrow London beds in close, low-ceilinged rooms, oppressed them both. And the little ritual Rimbaud habitually indulged, of playing with a clasp-knife before engaging in obligatory acts of congress. More a poetic duty than a sexual imperative.

  Verlaine plodded up the stairs. ‘Do you know how ridiculous you look?’ Retaliation came with a slap of wet fish across Rimbaud’s cheek. The brief London interlude of wandering and drinking and consorting with socialists and warming themselves in the Reading Room at the British Museum was over.

  Campbell thought that the poets, who drank at the Hibernia tavern in Old Compton Street, might have come across Karl Marx. Who might also have crossed aisles with Rimbaud in the British Museum. Late speculations provoked walks, as walks provoked essays. Like Patrick Keiller, Campbell relished the romance of disappearance, of seeking out the heat traces of poets and artists who passed through London suburbs, lodged in obscurity, leaving their marks in secret notebooks, posthumous Illuminations. ‘Their heads lolling on the slopes of strange parks … their railways cut alongside.’

  As sketched by Félix Régamey, as they argue through the streets, the French poets are a fugitive couple, so studied in bohemianism that they look like undercover agents. Behind the firmly inked outline of Verlaine with his papers, walking stick, cigar, and the vagrant farm boy, Rimbaud, with his clay pipe, is the ghost of a caped and helmeted London bobby. Verlaine’s cultivated paranoia was an accurate prophecy of the modern city as a labyrinth of eyes, a surveillance state. Spies were tracking him. Divorce agents. Political police. Graham Robb in his biography Rimbaud says that the Paris Préfecture was ‘receiving high-grade intelligence’ from London. A city so eager to launder the world’s money, the fruits of colonial plunder, is ripe for the double-dealing of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. In every discussion group of malcontents, there is at least one informer. And, as with Mr Verloc’s grubby shop, pornography is the convenient medium of exchange. Poetry was a vice to be exposed and eliminated.

  Detouring around an electrified disability carriage of Stephen Hawking proportions, we were admitted to the hallway of the Royal College Street boarding house. And confronted by a vast portrait of Lady Thatcher on her throne, hair burnished, toying with a bundle of state papers. The impact was like that slap of wet fish. Thatcher, taking pride of place, was accompanied by more modest renderings of Winston Churchill and Alec Douglas-Home. Michael Crosby, a man with theatrical affiliations, and the ambition to present his property as a haunted set, caught my eye.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m
not a Tory,’ he said. ‘I’m Ukip.’

  Facing Thatcher, on the opposite wall, was a poster for a play by Crosby, Dracula’s Dream.

  We took off our shoes to make the ascent to rooms competing to supply the window from which Rimbaud watched his partner return from market. Crosby, in canary-yellow shirt, untucked, with large cuffs, sprawled in a bedroom chair, in a close cabin that was all bed and oval mirror. Rudolf’s hawkish profile played nicely against a gilt-framed portrait of some fierce Scottish bird of prey. We peered down into a token garden arranged with obelisks and a cherub.

  The house had history and Rudolf was just the persistent kind of poet-researcher to tease it out. He recalled a period when these rooms were squatted by ketamine-snacking veterinary students. The Rimbaud legend was then entrusted to local visionaries like Aidan Andrew Dun, whose poem Vale Royal namechecks the French visitors as elements in a new mapping of a mythology of place. Bob Dylan paid a visit. And Patti Smith put in an offer to purchase this chunk of countercultural heritage.

  Crosby points out that Royal College Street was where the taxidermist had his premises in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much. He didn’t say which version.

  After Highbury, we levitated. The railway was an old rib. It seemed to work best to stay off Ball’s Pond Road. And to come down the handsomely proportioned Mildmay Grove with the tracks always alongside, singing us into harbour.

  There were more dead Christmas trees lying on the pavement. Andrew, gripped by some primitive reflex, rolled himself over a low wall, to piss at prodigious length in the bushes of a block of flats.

  When we came to the bridge over the railway, I decided to detour down Kingsbury Road, to identify the house where my early books, and the Albion Village Press publications by Brian Catling, Chris Torrance and J. H. Prynne, had been printed. Back Garden Poems, from 1970, featured a map of the locality on the fixed endpapers, a register of persons and landmarks drawn by Renchi Bicknell. Many of the named presences were now decamped, others were dead. Buildings had been demolished, public houses converted into flats. Ted’s radio-repair shop on Kingsland Road was a distant memory.